50 Greatest Muppet Movie Moments

Restart the music, relight the lights

It's Time To Start The Music

The Moment: As The Muppets prepare for their reunion show, Kermit orders a rehearsal and discovers things might not be as fluid as they once were.

Muppet Magic: A pitch-perfect parody of the classic Muppet Show title sequence, featuring giant Muppets getting stuck and Link Hogthrob having a chat under one of the famous Muppet Theater arches.

Nursery Rhymes

The Moment: The germ of the idea for Muppet Babies is born in The Muppets Take Manhattan , as Miss Piggy's fantasy about meeting Kermit as infants turns into nursery anthem 'I'm Gonna Always Love You'.

Muppet Magic: Rowlf can still rock it even in a nappy.

Figureheads

The Moment: How do you get Statler and Waldorf to Muppet Treasure Island ? Why, by making them the figureheads at the bow of the Hispaniola, of course.

Muppet Magic: When Statler complains about being stuck on the front of the ship, Waldorf replies, ever the critic, that "it could be worse. We could be stuck in the audience."

Trigger Words

The Moment: In The Muppets , Gary, Walter and Kermit find Animal chained up to keep "in control" of his drumming and taking anger management lessons with court-appointed sponsor Jack Black.

Muppet Magic: It's Black, not Animal, who freaks out when everybody starts to say the wrong thing. "Tuesday is another of my trigger words!"

One More Thing

The Moment: "I know your whole story," reckons bum Peter Falk to Kermit in The Great Muppet Caper , but as he proceeds to tell the frog the tale of how his own dry cleaning business went belly-up it's clear he's lost it big-time.

Muppet Magic: Kermit breaks the fourth wall to tell Falk, "I hate to be rude, but we're trying to do a movie here."

Acceptable In The 80s

The Moment: Kermit reveals his New Coke-serving butler, 80s Robot - a self-aware joke at the expense of The Muppets ' resurrection of an old favourite.

Muppet Magic: Ordered to seek out the other Muppets, 80s Robot consults the Internet via a (very noisy) dial-up modem.

Deserted

The Moment: Marooned in the desert in The Muppet Movie , the Muppets are soothed by Gonzo's fireside ballad about finding his place in the world, 'I'm Going To Go Back There Someday'.

Muppet Magic: This song gets its ultimate payback two decades later, as Gonzo's origins are explained during Muppets From Space .

Nightmare Interruption

The Moment: The terrifying nightmare sequence in An American Werewolf In London , where David Kessler dreams that his family is attacked by monster Nazis while watching The Muppet Show .

Muppet Magic: The wrenching surrealism of the scene owes much to the suburban normality of watching Kermit and co. on telly.

Slip Of The Tongue

The Moment: As Kermit silences his fellow Muppets mid-argument in The Great Muppet Caper , he leaves Janice stranded in mid-sentence, giving away more than she perhaps meant to.

Muppet Magic: Janice's cryptic one-liner in full: "Look, Mother. It's my life. OK. So if I want to live on a beach and walk around naked... Oh."

The Pig Wears Prada

The Moment: The Muppets track down Miss Piggy to Paris, where she's become the plus-size fashion editor of Vogue.